Peer feedback is a practice in language education where feedback given by one student to another. Peer feedback is used in writing classes of both first language and second language to provide students more opportunities to learn from each other. After students finish a writing assignment, the instructor has two or more than two students work together to check each other's work and give comments to the peer partner. Comments from peers are called as peer feedback. Peer feedback can be in the form of corrections, opinions, suggestions, ideas to each other. Thus, peer feedback is a two-way process in which one cooperates with the other.
According to Atay and Kurt (2007),[1] there are effects on adopting peer feedback in class. First, it provides diversity with teaching compared with the traditional way of giving teacher feedback. In peer feedback session, students do not just listen to teacher' instructions, but work with their peers to do more practices in writing. In this case, students' anxiety becomes lower and learning motivation can be higher.
Second, sharing opinions with peers is helpful in building and increasing one's confidence. Clearly expressing what one is trying to say requires confidence and sufficient knowledge; people need to self dress what to say with their own knowledge or experiences. Thus, giving useful feedback definitely strengthens one's confidence. Moreover, peer feedback helps student to take more responsibilities in learning process. Besides doing assignments, students have to read others' work carefully as well so that one is not only responsible for his/her own work but also the others'.
Peer feedback equips students with social affective strategies. Since peer feedback evolves interactive learning, meaningful communication is necessary, and there are many social affective strategies which are extremely helpful in creating good communication. Social affective strategies can be acquired through peer feedback such as listening carefully, speaking at the right moment, expressing clearly, appreciating others, compromising, and so on.
Limitations
However, there are some drawbacks of peer feedback, too. According to Connor and Asenavage's study in 1994, they found that teacher feedback has more influences on students' writing work. There’s only 5 percents of peer feedback to be taken to make changes of the work. Students respect and respond more to their teacher's feedback rather than their peers' feedback, and they often take peer feedback for granted so that they do not make corrections based on it. Thus, the teachers' strict requirement on students to do revisions is crucial for how students treat either teacher feedback or peer feedback.
In addition, some students actually lack ability to give peer feedback owing to insufficient knowledge. In this case, students hardly learn from others, so peer feedback loses track of its original rationale to help the other get improvement.
Impact of cultural differences
Based on Allaei and Connor's finding (1990), students' view of peer feedback can be very different due to cultural differences, so the effectiveness of using peer feedback will not be the same in different situations. For example, Chinese students learning English are more likely to welcome peer feedback (Hu, 1995) than people from western countries because Chinese likes to work together and maintain harmony in a group (Carson and Nelson, 1994), but western people prefer individual study. Therefore, it is assumed that peer feedback may be more useful in Chinese learning environment than in Western countries.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peer feedback is a practice in language education where feedback given by one student to another. Peer feedback is used in writing classes of both first language and second language to provide students more opportunities to learn from each other. After students finish a writing assignment, the instructor has two or more than two students work together to check each other's work and give comments to the peer partner. Comments from peers are called as peer feedback. Peer feedback can be in the form of corrections, opinions, suggestions, ideas to each other. Thus, peer feedback is a two-way process in which one cooperates with the other.
Contents
Benefits
According to Atay and Kurt (2007),[1] there are effects on adopting peer feedback in class. First, it provides diversity with teaching compared with the traditional way of giving teacher feedback. In peer feedback session, students do not just listen to teacher' instructions, but work with their peers to do more practices in writing. In this case, students' anxiety becomes lower and learning motivation can be higher.Second, sharing opinions with peers is helpful in building and increasing one's confidence. Clearly expressing what one is trying to say requires confidence and sufficient knowledge; people need to self dress what to say with their own knowledge or experiences. Thus, giving useful feedback definitely strengthens one's confidence. Moreover, peer feedback helps student to take more responsibilities in learning process. Besides doing assignments, students have to read others' work carefully as well so that one is not only responsible for his/her own work but also the others'.
Peer feedback equips students with social affective strategies. Since peer feedback evolves interactive learning, meaningful communication is necessary, and there are many social affective strategies which are extremely helpful in creating good communication. Social affective strategies can be acquired through peer feedback such as listening carefully, speaking at the right moment, expressing clearly, appreciating others, compromising, and so on.
Limitations
However, there are some drawbacks of peer feedback, too. According to Connor and Asenavage's study in 1994, they found that teacher feedback has more influences on students' writing work. There’s only 5 percents of peer feedback to be taken to make changes of the work. Students respect and respond more to their teacher's feedback rather than their peers' feedback, and they often take peer feedback for granted so that they do not make corrections based on it. Thus, the teachers' strict requirement on students to do revisions is crucial for how students treat either teacher feedback or peer feedback.In addition, some students actually lack ability to give peer feedback owing to insufficient knowledge. In this case, students hardly learn from others, so peer feedback loses track of its original rationale to help the other get improvement.
Impact of cultural differences
Based on Allaei and Connor's finding (1990), students' view of peer feedback can be very different due to cultural differences, so the effectiveness of using peer feedback will not be the same in different situations. For example, Chinese students learning English are more likely to welcome peer feedback (Hu, 1995) than people from western countries because Chinese likes to work together and maintain harmony in a group (Carson and Nelson, 1994), but western people prefer individual study. Therefore, it is assumed that peer feedback may be more useful in Chinese learning environment than in Western countries.